On 15 Jan 2004, at 09:12, Jorg Heymans wrote:
Using the windows description of accessibility : "Adjust your computer settings for vision, hearing and mobility".
We can break this down
- vision : i can imagine an xsl that adjusts font sizes, font color, table layout for relatively "clean" html. A quick search around revealed (1), which deals with some of the issues involved and gives guidelines on how to make "accessible" html. How to convert any html to accessible html will be quite difficult, if you however are in control of the layout you could already make the html more friendly to convert.
Most browsers (except I think MSIE for Windows) have a control for zooming the text size.
If your layouts+css use relative units of measurement (like em) then this can provide a smooth resizing of page content and layout.
- hearing : there are a lot of free java libs available that do text-to-speech. If the html is designed according to the rules in (1), you could just walk the html layout and make the parts audible. Internationalization even should not be the problem, pluggable language libs are available as well.
CSS has an 'audio' component for defining how content is spoken in browsers designed for the disabled.
Accessibility guidelines rely very heavily of having the right descriptive meta data available for specialised browsers to provide hints to the user.
If this meta data is not available in your content, no amount of clever stuff from Cocoon would get over that.
Note to the list:
I feel a block design bubbling up here, i think it would be a good entry point for me as I've never made a block. WDYT?
links (1)http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/default.asp (2)http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/mbrola_entrypage.html (3)google for "text to speech java"
http://bobby.watchfire.com
Will test your pages for Accessibility issues defined in the W3.org's WAI initiative.
regards Jeremy
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